ecosophia | In From The Fringes

I was highly amused to see the following piece from Chris Hedges the other day, thanks to several readers who forwarded links:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/08/15/chris-hedges-the-final-collapse/

My readers will find quite a bit of it very, very familiar. Hedges, a former New York Times correspondent, author of books, and on-and-off media darling, argues that modern industrial society is in decline and faces imminent collapse, following patterns that differ in scale but not in kind from the fates of past civilizations. He quotes Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History and Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, and cites quite a range of facts and figures of a sort that I've discussed repeatedly here and on my blogs for the last sixteen years.

That said, I have no idea whether Hedges got the idea for this essay from blog posts of mine. It may be that he simply noticed what's happening right in front of everyone, drew the logical conclusions, and did a little research to fill in the details. Nor am I in the least perturbed to find my ideas being echoed in so much more widely read a forum -- quite the contrary.

That's the secret power of the fringe intellectual, after all. If you happen to live in a society in decline, as I do, and you want to talk freely about what's wrong and why the official solutions being hawked about by tame intellectuals won't work, all you have to do is find some venue for your ideas where you won't be censored. Keep at it, and so long as your ideas are at least marginally less stupid than those you're critiquing, they will begin to exert a weird gravitational attraction on the collective consciousness of your time. Eventually the official pundits will be mouthing your words without the least consciousness that they're doing so. Entertaining? You bet; certainly I'm entertained...

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The term "magical thinking" as Hedges used it is a slur of sorts in this context, because it misrepresents what magic is, by referring to a popular stereotype. But the phenomenon the phrase refers to, such as expecting an effect to occur because it is desired rather than because any cause is apparent, is rather common, and relevant to the topic. "They'll think of something" is a good example. It would be useful to have an acceptable term for it. "Wishful thinking" might cover it (and certainly covers that example) but might not have quite the same scope.

I've actually been meaning to ask about "magical thinking" in a Magic Monday one of these days, for exactly this reason - the way the term is used in mainstream psychology is definitely describing something that happens and that it's helpful to identify - for example, beyond only "wishful thinking" the mental process of someone with OCD who believes that his failure to wash his hands will result in some calamity in the outside world is also often described the same way.

Mainstream materialism has a pat answer: expecting a causal or correlative link between actions without any physical explanation for their linkage is "magical thinking". Once you accept that there are non-material causal/correlative links, it seems like it might get rather harder to so simply define which ones are clearly erroneous, which ones deserve investigation, and which ones seem pretty clearly linked.

So, if JMG or anyone else has any thoughts on sorting out the wheat from the chaff in the materialist conception of "magical thinking", I'd certainly appreciate hearing about it.

Thanks much,
Jeff

The term "magical thinking" as used by materialists refers to a real thing -- it just doesn't have anything to do with magic as such. Start with the definition of magic I use: the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will. A magical act is therefore (1) intentional, (2) mediated by consciousness, and (3) drawing on an established body of technique, which relates to personal expression (art) but also to formally understood structures in reality (science).

If the OCD person was using handwashing as a tool to transform his consciousness to accomplish an intention, that would be magic. His fear that he will suffer some unnamed doom if he doesn't wash his hands isn't magic, it's psychopathology.

Ah, that makes good sense and is pretty close to what I think I was groping toward. I think that the biggest disconnect between materialists and folks who look to other factors is a difference in opinion about just what things are "2) mediated by consciousness", but that "3) drawing on an established body of technique. . ." provides the way out of this for those of us willing to entertain the idea of non-physical causal/correlative links between phenomena.

An example to try to clarify:
- A) If someone with OCD is using handwashing to try to stave off some unnamed doom, with no notion of whose consciousness might be altered, almost definitely psychopathology.

- B) If someone is following a well-established tradition that handwashing is a necessary step in calling upon the Storm God to avert damages from an incoming hurricane, folks of a magical bent can be reasonably certain that's magic and not pathology.

- C) The gray area would be someone asserting that his handwashing affects some consciousness that isn't part of a recognized tradition - then it's on him to gather evidence and convince others that this is a method and not an illness.

Thanks again,
Jeff

I really like the materialist pat answer you gave because coming to magic felt like its negation to me. Missing the strings that correlate phenomena is folly; getting out of your way to insist there aren't any is madness; and we've been trained to do that to some degree.

"Show light to the creatures of the night and you hide their light; it is the light that blinds them and for them is darker than darkness."

It used to be very common to note the similarities between the insane and the shaman, between the wandering, tattered outcast and the extreme philosopher, saint or sadhu and so on. I guess it just comes down to learning to open and close the veil or having a hole punched through it but both seem to reveal the importance of ritualistic, intentional acts; it is just that one lets you work with it and the other makes you the thing being worked upon.

I've been to places with mentally ill people and some of them, honestly, seem saner in some sense than the sane.

In From The Fringes

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